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Small tips that make a big difference.

The very term ‘spring clean’ has unfortunate connotations, implying that some of us don’t thoroughly clean our houses for an entire year. Well, we’re afraid to say that not only is that often true, but it can be the case for your website’s SEO as well.

You see, there are so many little aspects of your company’s site that may be dragging down its search engine rankings, but which you may not even notice until you take a closer look.

So, here are some of the best ways to give your site what may be an essential SEO spring clean.

Get rid of duplicate metadata

We’ll start with something easy – ensuring that all of your title tags and meta descriptions are genuinely unique.

Remember, though, to keep within the widely accepted limits when writing new ones – around 65 characters as far as the title tags are concerned, and about 155 characters for the meta descriptions.

Eliminate redirect chains

What redirect chains does your site presently have? By this, we’re referring to how many instances your site has of one URL redirecting to another, and then to another, and so on due to various pages having become obsolete over time.

Given the multiple server requests that are required when a visitor to your site passes through one of these chains, you can probably begin to see how damaging they can be in terms of wasting your limited server resources and slowing down loading times.

So, don’t keep them around any longer – ask your developers to replace each old chain with a single redirect from the first URL to the last one.

Tweak low-performing pages

You may understandably focus the bulk of your attention on your highest-performing pages, but have you looked closely enough recently at those sections of your site that aren’t doing so well?

It may be that a given page drives a lot of traffic but not many conversions, in which case, you may need to introduce or alter conversion elements. Alternatively, there may be a page that is targeting the right keyword themes but isn’t attracting much natural search traffic. By poring over the data you have for this page and considering different perspectives, you can begin to figure out why.

We’re sure many of you reading this will be well aware of the term ‘responsive web design’, which is the practice of designing a site so that it renders well across multiple devices.

Today, it couldn’t be more vital for any ecommerce firm to have a mobile-optimised site, and responsive design has long been deemed the best route to take to achieve this goal.

However, with the increasing prevalence of responsive web design, has also come many an error in its implementation that should be easily avoided. Here are just a few of them.

1. Overly small call-to-action buttons

While it’s understandable that you will wish to ensure every element of your website fits onto a small smartphone screen, this brings the risk that the call-to-action buttons will be too small for visitors to easily tap.

If customers continually accidentally click the wrong button or have to zoom in simply to tap it, such a compromised user experience could lead to them exiting the site. So, be sure to design a site with call-to-action buttons that are neither too small, nor too close to each other.

2. Support for only one image resolution

The detrimental effect that overly large images have on the loading times of a mobile site should mean that your own site design alters the resolution of its images based on the user’s device.

The good news is that there are many ways to ensure this happens automatically, such as the picture HTML5 element or various WordPress plugins.

3. Non-responsive emails

As wonderfully responsive as your main site may be, major usability issues can be created if the emails that your company sends are not also responsive to match.

You won’t want a situation where your mobile users find it difficult to even review their order details or browse through the list of products you’ve recommended to them in an email. Emails need to be treated as the key customer touch point that they are, being given their own role in the responsive design and testing process.

4. Giving mobile users less content

Presenting mobile users with a ‘second-class’ version of your desktop website isn’t a great idea, not least as they may be seeking information with their smartphone that they saw earlier on your desktop site.

Statistics show that the vast majority of online shoppers use more than one device. You therefore need to have a website that is generated dynamically in accordance with the size of the user’s screen, instead of simply hiding vital content.

5. Slow loading times

Mobile users are especially likely to want to take swift action. This means your page size should be kept as small as possible, which will necessitate you carefully considering what content is actually required on the page. Are there certain images, buttons and text that you could dispense with?

Remember that we aren’t contradicting our earlier point here; this isn’t about making your mobile site an inferior counterpart to your desktop one. If certain content must be kept at least somewhere, consider separating it across different tabs.

Would you like to benefit from a gorgeously responsive site for your ecommerce business? We are highly experienced and skilled in CMS website design, and through our packages at various price points, can provide the solution that suits your firm’s needs and ambitions.

If you have spent any time running an ecommerce site, you may have at least been tempted to take your own images of certain products being offered on your site. However, there’s more to impactful self-made product photography than simply setting up a camera and tripod and snapping away at subjects on a white background.

That’s because, as important as the time-honoured product photography rules are, it also helps to subtly break them occasionally if you are to produce the most memorable images. Take a look at some of our below suggestions to see what we mean.

Hang products

You may well be quite accustomed to seeing products pictured hanging when browsing ecommerce sites, so this isn’t necessarily a hugely distinctive tip. However, there are so many ways to creatively hang products, ranging from hanging them upside down and sideways to suspending the item from wires and ropes that also serve as an integral part of the photo.

Don’t be afraid to show a sense of humour and experiment with approaches. The lighting of your images has to be consistently impeccable too, of course.

Macro shots

‘Macro photography’ refers to the practice of taking extreme close-up shots of what may actually be very small items, and there’s no question that these can be very impactful. However, we would also urge you to use such images next to more ‘standard’ product shots so that the viewer has a good sense of what the item really looks and feels like.

Again, lighting is really important here, as macro photography is at its most impressive when even the tiniest and most intricate details are visible.

Keep the background in focus

The conventional wisdom in product photography is that when you have an off-focus background, the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to the main product in the foreground.

But there’s little to stop you preserving a clear background while also still placing your product slightly in front. You may, for example, place a food product alongside similar items to indicate how it may be used.

Make use of reflection

You can make an otherwise boring image more interesting by applying a reflective effect. This can be done with a mirror, but there are also other ways of doing it.

You might place the product in a shallow pan of water, for example, combined with interesting lighting effects. Or what about using image-editing software to show reflections in water and other surfaces? The result can be more subtle – but still interesting – than you presume will be the case.

Combine these product photography tips with our far-reaching know-how in ecommerce website design here at Piranha Designs, and you can give your brand an impressive online presence that belies the relatively little you might have spent on it.

If you were online in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you may remember Ask Jeeves, which was a search engine that in many ways, presaged what Google and other search titans today attempt to do: provide a useful response to specific user questions, instead of merely keywords.

It was certainly a compelling concept in its day – the eponymous ‘Jeeves’, by the way, being a gentleman character based on the fictional valet of P. G. Wodehouse character Bertie Wooster.

The character used to appear on the site’s homepage, but the delivery of the question-and-answer functionality was as clunky as you might expect given the times, and Jeeves himself was sent into retirement in 2006.

But with all of the design and technology innovations that have happened since, there’s now a lot more scope for the modern online business owner to ensure their own site’s search function produces robust and relevant results. Here are some of those that we would suggest.

Spelling assistance

Imagine how time-consuming and laborious it would be to manually input all of the conceivable ways in which a given search term could be misspelled. This feature, then, has to be something that can intelligently understand potential user mistakes by itself.

Automatic filtering of common conjunctions and articles

Conjunctions like “and”, “or” and “but”, as well as articles such as “the”, “a” and “an”, can be filtered out of users’ searches, unless one of these words is part of the name of a product.

Alternative words, aka “Did you mean?”

Shoppers may not know the exact terms used in the name of the product they are looking for, or may not understand the correct meanings of certain words. Whatever the situation, incorporating this function into your site search helps to prevent you missing out on sales.

The ability to enter alternative terms yourself

While we made the point above that an intelligent search feature should be able to accommodate many alternative spellings or terms that a user may enter, this work can’t be solely left to the search tool. After all, new alternative phases gain popularity all of the time, and you will be able to identify these through search data, so it helps to be able to incorporate them into your search feature.

Relevant recommendations

It does happen, from time to time, that a user enters a term that delivers zero results. In such a situation, rather than your site presenting your user with a largely blank ‘sorry’ page, you might want to ensure other products or categories are presented to them to increase the likelihood of a sale.

These aren’t the only key features that are incorporated into the most sophisticated search functions of today’s ecommerce stores. When you turn to the team here at Piranha Designs for our custom website design services, you can discuss with us in more detail what form your own site’s search feature could take.

Building an enduring relationship with your customers through content marketing depends on the creation of content that they find genuinely interesting and useful. So when your company’s writers are composing blog posts for the third month of the year, what subjects should they cover?

Here are a few ideas that could help to cultivate a connection between your store and its target customers that leads to sales.

Success stories

March is a month of optimism – the time of year when the arrival of spring becomes fully apparent and many of your blog’s readers will be looking to put the dreariness of the winter months behind them.

It’s therefore a fine time to publish blog articles outlining success stories related to the industry that your company serves. If you run a health food store, for instance, you may tell your readers about those who have felt reinvigorated by certain products bought from your store.

Essential spring tasks

Spring has long been associated with cleaning and gardening. There are certainly many tasks that your target customers are likely to need to get on with at this time of year, and they’re sure to appreciate informed guidance as to how they can do the best possible job.

Those running a holiday booking site, for example, may wish to use the opportunity that March presents to urge any of their customers still contemplating a summer holiday to book now before their preferred flights and hotels become unavailable for their chosen dates.

Outdoor activities

The brightening days and creeping temperatures of the mid-spring lend themselves well to blog content about projects in the garden, weekend getaways or pretty much anything else embracing the great outdoors.

So, think carefully about what blog posts could motivate your customers to get outside and enjoy the open air. This may mean an online store dedicated to sports supplements suggesting to its blog readers the outdoor workouts that may best suit their get-fit aims this year.

Nutrition ideas

Linked to the aforementioned point, many of your blog readers will be interested to know how they can support their efforts to achieve a ‘beach-ready body’ (if they aspire to such a thing) with the most appropriate nutrition.

Perhaps you could advise your readers on how their kids could eat better during the month, provide ideas for healthy lunchtime meals at work, or indicate what foods could be invaluable when they next go backpacking?

Remember that we offer onsite and offsite blog content writing as part of our Platinum search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing package here at Piranha Designs, alongside such other key services as keyword research and social set-up. Why not get in touch with us at our Gibraltar, London or Edinburgh offices to learn how our expertise in these areas could benefit your brand?

There aren’t many elements of an ecommerce site that play as critical a role as its calls to action (CTA) – yet, it can also be easy for them to be overshadowed by other features.

That means your own site’s CTAs might not be delivering the punch they should when you instruct your site visitor to perform a certain action – so let’s take a look at some of the best ways to fix that.

1. Ensure they’re simple and recognisable

Do you want your site visitor to ‘add to cart’ or ‘purchase’ an item? Fine – so use those words. They’re the words that even your new customers already instinctively know and understand.

2. Use colours that work within the site design

When picking a colour for your CTA text or button, the accepted rule of thumb is to ensure it makes sense within the wider scheme of your site.

Whether you go for a colour that is similar to or contrasts with what is around it, it shouldn’t blend in too much with its surroundings, but also shouldn’t stand out so much that it detracts from the rest of the site.

3. Support them with secondary calls to action

The critical importance of a primary CTA should go without saying, but you can further ensure potential customers remain on your site by providing secondary CTAs that make it easy for them to take alternative courses of action.

Examples of good secondary CTAs range from ‘save for later’ and ‘add to wish list’ to ‘shop for related items’ and ‘buy accessories’.

4. Make them text-based, with a solid background

As tempting as it may be to try to grab attention with fancy graphics, a busy-looking CTA creates the risk that the customer will simply be distracted, instead of carrying out the desired action.

5. Group your ‘add to cart’ CTA with other options

If the product is one for which the shopper will need to select a size, colour or other specification options, by including the CTA immediately below the selection, you can help to speed up the process so that the customer reaches the checkout and enters their payment details all the sooner.

Remember that your site’s CTAs need to be among the most noticeable features of each page of your site – otherwise, your conversions may not be as high as they could be.

Why not discuss the many fine aspects of your next website design with the Piranha Designs team? Contact our experienced professionals now at our Gibraltar head office, or browse our website for more information about what our web design services could do for your firm.

As much as you might sometimes wish otherwise, your site visitors don’t exist in a state of perfect isolation. They’re browsing your site while surrounded by all manner of possible distractions – sat in their kitchen with their children yapping for their attention, or enjoying a quick lunch break before their boss calls them back into the office, or waiting for a taxi to arrive at their home... the list goes on.

Your site is effectively competing with all manner of ‘real life’ things for your visitors’ attention. So if they do get distracted and then forget about your site, how can you attract them back?

Be more memorable than any of your competitors

While many of us might bemoan popular tabloid news sites that attract attention through lurid headlines and sensationalism rather than truth, the reality is that making your site memorable does work a treat for getting people to make repeat visits.

Sometimes, that principle is taken to extremes – just take a look at the famously garish website for LingsCars, for instance. It’s a genuine business, but you might not have thought so at first glance. Nonetheless, it’s not a website you’re going to forget in a hurry.

But there are other, slightly milder ways to make your business’s site memorable, such as by giving your brand a quirky name, having an entertaining and engaging tone of voice or investing in video ads that are ripe to go viral.

Establish a means of ongoing customer communication

Obtaining a prospective customer’s contact details, or getting them to follow you in some other way online, takes the pressure off your company to immediately convert their interest into a sale. You won’t have to do it within one session, and can instead persuade them over a period of days, weeks, months or even years.

So, how can you establish that means of communication? Well, you could offer them a tempting, no-brainer deal – such as a free trial or demo – with a tiny commitment, such as providing their email address or other contact details, that makes it an almost impossible offer to refuse.

Convincing your visitors to follow your brand on Facebook, Twitter or a similarly popular social platform is another potentially good move. This will be made much easier if your social feeds provide a rich stream of content that is engaging, relevant and usable for your target audience.

Or why not launch an ad retargeting campaign? There’s a strong likelihood that if a given target customer was sufficiently interested in your site once, a well-placed ad will convince them to come back.

How could we help your firm with its 2018 goals?

The above steps can do a lot to ensure that a customer relationship that would’ve otherwise been a one-night stand becomes a longer-term commitment. But there’s much more that we can do to enhance your brand’s online fortunes here at Piranha Designs.

It only takes a few minutes of Googling to unearth statistics showing just how important customer reviews can be to your company. One recent survey found that 60% of consumers look at online reviews at least once a week, with 93% stating that reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

Links have also been made between customer reviews and improved ecommerce conversion rates - and it's thought that they play an instrumental role in making your site's product pages easier to find in the search engines as well.

All of this, combined with the natural rise in ecommerce sales volume that greets Christmas, makes it an obvious step to do everything possible to encourage the posting of customer reviews as an aid to your post-Yuletide marketing.

Customer reviews have strong value for ecommerce sites

There are plenty more statistics like the above that firmly signal just how much customer reviews could bring to your online business. Did you know, for example, that 82% of consumers say the content of a review has convinced them to make a purchase?

However, it's also vital not to underestimate the SEO dimension of customer reviews, with Google believed to favour sites that have received positive reviews over those with no reviews when using them as a factor to determine search engine rankings.

Customer reviews also often contain long-tail keywords, which could further assist in making your site easier for casual online searchers to discover.

So, what can you do to boost how many reviews you receive?

The greater number of visits to and sales at online stores during December means that now is definitely the time of year, of all times of year, to encourage customer reviews. But how can you do that?

The most straightforward and obvious way is to simply ask for reviews. You may do this through marketing emails that also give you the opportunity to signal how much you appreciate your customer’s purchase, and your interest in receiving honest feedback that will enable you to improve the products your business sells.

You could make a similar request in a social media update, asking those of your followers who have shopped with you whether they would be kind enough to provide a review.

Given the greater impact that reviews for more expensive items may have, it might be a good idea to go further here, perhaps by sending a handwritten card to those who bought such products from you, thanking them for choosing your store and asking them to post a review.

But what if you attract negative reviews?

It’s almost certain that your company, product or service will attract a bad review from time to time. Nor is that always a bad thing, given that the occasional poor review amid the five-star reviews you hope to receive will probably help to make your wider body of public feedback more believable.

Indeed, one study a few years ago showed that ecommerce sites could expect to gain the best conversion rates when their average product review scores hovered between 4.2 and 4.5 on a scale of one to five.

All in all, post-Christmas reviews can definitely be a big part of your firm’s marketing mix as you head into the New Year, so don’t underestimate them! Remember, too, that here at Piranha Designs, we can provide the website design and other services that will help your business to get 2018 off to the best possible start.

When you’re building or running an ecommerce site, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll end up with some form of duplicate content on your site. You’re probably thinking of that as very much a bad thing for your site’s search engine performance, but not necessarily for the reason you think.

Doesn’t duplicate content attract a penalty from Google?

It’s interesting that this idea of duplicate content on a website resulting in a penalty from Google has actually persisted for so long. As it happens, a Google blog from as long ago as 2008 declared: “Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a ‘duplicate content penalty.’”

However, duplicate content can still be a major detriment to your site’s search engine fortunes, despite the lack of any formal penalties to be imposed for it.

It’s an algorithmic ‘dampening’ issue, rather than one of any human on Google’s web quality team being alerted to certain pages of yours, judging them to be spammy and slapping your site with a punishment accordingly.

After all, when you do have duplicate content on your site, you’re effectively competing with yourself for the same keyword theme. It means that the link authority you would have gained from one page is instead split across two or more pages. When you have duplicates of one page, that page is also less relevant to search engines, which are forced to determine which one to rank.

So, surely the answer is to kill those pages...

Alas, simply removing duplicate content on your site can have undesirable effects. Remember that certain content that is technically duplicated from elsewhere – such as a customer’s ‘wish list’ page or a printable version of a product page – can be useful to visitors to your site.

Getting rid of such content may therefore harm the experience that you give to your site users, which may in turn adversely impact your sales and revenue. But on the other hand, there may be certain duplicate content that you have to remove regardless of any detrimental SEO or customer experience effects, such as if leaving it in place would put you at legal risk.

Exactly how you should deal with particular duplicate content on your site therefore depends on what you need to accomplish. There are a lot of good techniques for removing duplicate content or nullifying its SEO impact, ranging from 301 redirects and canonical tags to 404 ‘File Not Found’ errors and the Remove URLs tool in Google Search Console.

Would you appreciate help to remove or negate duplicate content on your site in a way that brings maximum customer experience and SEO benefits? If so, don’t hesitate to talk to our experts in ecommerce website design and search engine marketing today.

The world of ecommerce web design doesn’t stay still – there are always new techniques and technologies coming on stream to guide the site design process.

Here are just some of those that you should be aware of for the coming 12 months.

1. An even greater emphasis on video

Could we possibly have any more video online than we’ve had for the last few years? You might not think so, but with the amount of video on the web continuing to edge upwards, it’s a medium that still hasn’t been explored to its full potential on ecommerce sites.

Expect the coming year to be characterised by the ever-greater prevalence of videos in the background of websites or as hero images, as well as on product pages to provide greater insight into how specific items may be used by the customer.

2. Guided selling

Guided selling involves asking shoppers questions about what kind of products they’re looking for, what features they need and how they intend to use such products, so that the customer can be directed to the items that are the best match to their needs.

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon – the chances are that you’ve already seen sites incorporating ‘selectors’ and ‘finders’ to help to narrow down the products that suit you most.

However, there’s a strong likelihood that you will see much more functionality like this on ecommerce sites as 2018 wears on.

3. More microinteractions

Microinteractions are those little details that help to make the design of a website more satisfying for the human user – the ‘like’ function on Facebook is a great example of the original microinteraction, and they’ve become ever-more numerous since then.

On an ecommerce site, a microinteraction may also occur when a user writes a review for a recently purchased product, in the form of a small animation that thanks them for the submission and encourages them to write a review for any of the other items they’ve bought from the site.

According to Dan Saffer, who wrote the book Microinteractions: Designing with Details, a microinteraction consists of four key parts. These include the trigger that initiates or begins the microinteraction, the rules defining or determining what happens in that interaction, the feedback that communicates what is happening or has just happened, and the loops and modes governing the microinteraction’s content.

Microinteractions may only just be becoming ‘big’ in the ecommerce space, but you can expect site designers to be peppering their creations with them throughout 2018.

Would you like to equip your brand with the complete feature-laden, but effortless-to-use ecommerce portal in the coming 12 months? If so, get in touch with the Piranha Designs team now to discuss how our experts in ecommerce website design can help to make it possible.